F for Fowl.
Still a little of the criminal mastermind in you, eh, Papa? he thought, and wondered how much of that particular characteristic there was in himself.
However much there needs to be in order to keep Beckett safe, he decided.
With a tap to the temple of his spectacles, Myles activated the infrared filter in his lenses and noticed that, across the bay, the sniper was packing up his gear.
We were not the target, he realized now. A sniper with even one functioning eyeball could have easily picked us off on the beach. So, what were you after, Mr. Beardy Man?
He committed this puzzle to his subconscious, to be worked on in the background while he dealt with Sister Jeronima and the other mysterious player in their drama. A player who was now emerging from the seaweed silo—not that anyone but Myles would notice, for the creature, whatever it proved to be exactly, was more or less invisible.
Invisible, thought the Fowl twin. How mysterious.
And as his father often said: A mystery is simply an advanced puzzle. Thunder was once a mystery. A wise man learns from the unknown by making it known.
And the wise boy, Father, thought Myles now. He magnified his view of the silo creature and saw that a single body part was visible even without the infrared. Its right ear, which was pointed. Somewhere in Myles’s brain, a lightbulb flashed.
A pointed ear.
And then the pointy-eared creature began to pedal, and it lifted off after the ascending rescue basket.
Beck was right, thought Myles, glancing upward at his brother, who was already boarding the helicopter.
It was indeed a fairy on an invisible bicycle.
“D’Arvit,” he blurted, shocked that Artemis’s stories had been, in fact, historical rather than fictional.
Sister Jeronima mistook the blurt for a sneeze. “Bless you, chico,” she said. “The night air is cool.”
Myles did not bother to correct her, because an explanation would be difficult, considering that the word D’Arvit was a fairy swearword, according to Artemis’s fairy tales.
Myles silently vowed not to use it again, at least not until he knew what it meant exactly.
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye was surprised to find his mood brightening somewhat. This would have been a bombshell to anyone who knew him, as the duke was notorious for throwing royal tantrums when things did not go his way. He’d had an emotional hair trigger since childhood, when he would heave his toys from the stroller if refused a treat. At family gatherings, his father often embarrassed him with the story of how five-year-old Teddy had hurled his wooden horse over the St. George cliffs when the nanny served him lukewarm lemonade. And how Teddy had been so antisocial that it had become necessary to send him to Charterhouse boarding school at age five instead of seven, which was more traditional among those of the upper class. Now, one and a half centuries later, the duke’s general mood had not improved much, though he tended to take out his frustrations on other people’s property rather than his own and let his irritation fester in his stomach acid. Good form at all times.
And so Lord Teddy was surprised to find himself whistling as he packed his gear.
Whistling, Teddy old boy? Surely you ought to be sinking into your usual vengeful funk.
But no, he was verging on the exuberant.
And why would that be?
It would be, Teddy old fellow, because there is something afoot here.
I take a single shot and suddenly the army is swooping in for an extraction? The Fowls were an important family, but not that important.
The island was obviously under the surveillance of some agency or other.
This confirms my growing certainty that Brother Colman’s lead was sound.
Now Teddy had a choice: He could continue to stake out the island and wait for another troll, or he could follow the Fowl children and find the one he had wrapped earlier.
Lord Bleedham-Drye knew that, logically, he should maintain his surveillance on the soon-to-be-unguarded Dalkey Island, but his instinct said Follow the Fowls.
The duke trusted his instinct; it had kept him alive this long.
After all, it would be child’s play to follow the troll, for each Myishi CV round was radioactively coded, and Teddy had programmed the individual codes into his marvelous Myishi Drye wristwatch, which had over a thousand functions, including geo-pinned news alerts and actually telling the time. The Drye series was the gold standard in criminal appliances. It included watches, exercise machines, a gorgeous porcelain handgun, a line of lightweight bulletproof apparel, a light aircraft, and a range of communication devices. Each item was embossed with a copy of the famous Modigliani line portrait of the duke from 1915. In return for his sponsorship, Teddy had a yearly credit of five million US dollars with the company, and a fifty percent discount on anything above that amount. The slogan for the Drye range was Stay Drye in any situation with Myishi. It had been a most successful arrangement for both parties. And, in truth, Lord Teddy would have long since declared bankruptcy without the Myishi Corp sponsorship deal. For his part, Ishi Myishi had the seal of approval from one of the most respected criminal masterminds/mad scientists in the community, which shifted enough units to easily pay the duke’s tab.
Good old Myishi, thought Lord Teddy now, and his marvelous gadgets.
The duke and Ishi Myishi had been associates as man and boy. Or, more accurately, since Myishi was a boy who had lied about his age to join the Japanese army and Teddy Bleedham-Drye was a British army officer. The duke had discovered young Myishi breaking out of a prison shed in Burma, defending himself with a shotgun the lad had cobbled together from the frame and springs of his cot. Teddy recognized genius when he saw it and instead of turning the boy in, he’d arranged for him to study engineering in Cambridge. The rest, as they say, was history, albeit a secret one. By Teddy’s reckoning, Myishi had repaid his debt a hundred times over.
Make that a hundred and one, Teddy thought, for one of the duke’s sponsorship perks was a hunter-tracker system that could be bounced off several private satellites. And so, wherever in a several-hundred-mile radius that troll went, Teddy could easily follow.
The Fowls will never hear me coming, he thought. And they will never hear the bullets that kill them.
The Army Helicopter
Lazuli Heitz could not figure out the black-haired Fowl boy.
He just sat there smiling at her as though she were absolutely visible to him. But that could not be, for the other occupants of the chopper were completely ignoring her. The second boy was making bird noises at passing seagulls, while the woman in black plied the bespectacled kid with questions that he blithely ignored, maintaining both his eye contact with Lazuli and a broad grin.
That child radiates smugness, Lazuli thought. I don’t like him already. At the first opportunity, I shall retrieve the troll and get far away from these people.
In truth, she was beginning to regret her decision to board the helicopter in the first place. Perhaps she should have simply waited for LEPrecon to show up. But the decision was made now, and there was no point regretting it. Plus, her pedaling mechanism had been injured by the fall and she had barely managed to make it to the helicopter. Her wings had folded themselves into their rig as a sign that there would be no more flying until her suit regenerated. So now she needed to concentrate on her next step.
As her angel had told her: There is no future in the past.
Which meant that obsessively second-guessing your own decisions was a waste of time. At least, that’s what she took it to mean.